When Thomas Alcott returns to his childhood home to settle the estate of his estranged mother, he expects dust, silence, and a few worn ledgers from her long bookkeeping career. What he finds instead is a trail of meticulously recorded secrets?cryptic codes, vanished names, and unexplained transactions that span decades.

Ashridge is a town that forgets well. Its streets are clean, its residents polite, and its history buried under layers of ledgers and long looks the other way. But as Thomas digs deeper, drawn into the pages his mother never meant him to read, he begins to see patterns that shouldn't be there. Patterns of disappearance. Of complicity. Of silence purchased with cash and names crossed out like errors in a column.

The more he uncovers, the more uncertain his own past becomes. Who was his mother, really? And what was the cost of the quiet life she kept so carefully balanced?

As the truth rises from the dark corners of her records, one haunting question remains:

What if you were never who you thought you were?and someone accounted for your life long before you lived it?